Late last month British Airways made worldwide news when a flight scheduled from London City airport to Dusseldorf, Germany instead landing in Edinburgh. Apparently the wrong flight plan was used. The plane flew to Edinburgh and back to London City the night before and that’s what was repeated — passengers discovering the error when they were welcomed to Edinburgh upon landing.
Already we’ve seen another European flag carrier flying passengers to a wrong destination, just weeks later.
Star Alliance member Scandinavian operated flight SK2961 Copenhagen – Florence, Italy instead to Bologna, Italy on Thursday. At least this time they got the country right.
Reportedly the decision was made to fly to the wrong airport prior to pushing back. Pilots “did not have the correct flight route information for Florence” and instead of delaying the flight to solve that, decided to fly to Bologna instead and bus passengers from there. Somehow the airline claims this was all meant “to get the passengers to their destination as soon as possible.”
The decision to ‘just fly’ didn’t even mean pushing back on time (D0) as the flight was delayed over an hour. Continuing on to Florence would have meant just an additional 50 miles in the air.
What a load of bologna!
“decided to fly to Bologna instead and bus passengers from there”
This reminds me of the time I paid for a sleeper train from Venice to Paris, and we were woken up in the middle of the night at the Swiss/French border to be loaded on a bus because the SNCF workers were on strike.
No discounts, refunds…just loaded on a bus with a bunch of teenage Italians yelling constantly from 1am-6am while we were supposed to be sleeping nicely on a train. Had to waste the first day in Paris napping to get back on schedule.
@Steve S: Oh, the humanity!
I had something similar happen to me.
I was suppose to fly from LGA to Toronto Airport (YYZ) on AA. The plane was delayed several hours. Finally we took off. Instead of landing in YYZ, we landed in Buffalo. The Stewardess said that the plane was going to to back to LGA, but that anyone that wanted to, could get off the plane. I and about 5 other people were fine with going back to LGA, everyone else got off and found ground transport on their own.
So they offered transport vouchers to the 5 or 6 people remaining on the plane to YYZ. I managed to get a separate taxi voucher and asked the taxi to drop me off in downtown Toronto. The whole ordeal took about 9 hours.
This actually happens somewhat frequently due to weather in Florence. Diversions from Florence to Bologna or Pisa, followed by busing passengers to Florence, are not unusual at all. It doesn’t sound like that was the case in this scenario, but it could have been a factor. But when I first saw the headline map with the cities involved, my first reaction was that this isn’t newsworthy for those who fly to Florence airport regularly.